various plugs

This is to the roughly half of you out there who seem to follow fansubs. Some shows get a lot of attention and others don't get nearly enough.

Haibane Renmei is one of the shows that I think will get mostly ignored because it's "all talking". If it's any incentive, this show is also a rough adaptation of a manga written by the author of Lain. It's about an city that's more of a theological curiosity than a real town where haibane (angels) and people coexist. Lots of vague comparative religion, philosophy, drama, and creation theory turned upside-down. Don't miss this -- it's by far one of the most original and well-made show in years and when Pioneer brings it gets to the US I'm afraid it's predestined for the bargain bin.

As far as the other catagory goes.... Witch Hunter Robin falls into this one. I had this pegged as a winner at first, but it started to run out of gas around #10. By the way, in episode 15 where they had to write themselves out of a corner -- that's what rubber slugs are.

Gundam Seed and the new Ghost in the Shell TV show are both pretty decent. GitS writers, in particular, seem to have combed through the best in short story science fiction to come up with their ideas. Macross Zero is shaping up to a nifty little US-comic-styled origins tale but the production staff needs some 3D animation lessons from Production IG (GitS TV CG is spectacular, aside from that horrible opening). On the lighter side, Azumanga Daioh and Fruits Basket are both slapstick fun of varying degrees. If you're looking for a new show these are pretty safe bets. For a formulaic street kid turned savant show, Hikaru no Go is surprisingly well made also and creeping into a third season.

Avoid Noir. Noir is the queen mother of overhyped anime. Avoid Samuari Deeper Kyo. Avoid anything that resembles Three's Company.

You know what? I just realized that I should make a little weblog plugin for everyone's websites so they can just type in random messages on their own sites, maybe accompanied by pictures.

I'll add that to the long list of future features...

jn

Hmm...well I have seen up to episode 22 on Witch Hunter Robin and I like it pretty well. They could of made the series a whole lot better, but they didn't :( The opening theme is pretty cool though!

One of my favorite new anime right now is Samurai Deeper Kyo. I have seen up to episode 24 and it has turned out great I think. I love the samurai/ninja genre and it has been very entertaining. Too bad it only goes to 26.

I really don't like Noir all that much, nice music though.

.Hack//SIGN I do like though. Being a gamer and knowledge of MMORPG's drew me into this series. Awsome music and beautiful artwork.

I think I'll try out that Haibane Renmei series. It sounds pretty good.

It turns out that Haibane ends.... weird. I can't tell if it's a bad ending or if I'm just too dumb to "get" it. Probably the second. Major style points, regardless.

I can only seem to watch Hack when I am mildly intoxicated. It makes the show funnier. When one of the characters got ported to the GM zone for screwing with the game (or what looked like the GM zone), that inspired much heckling from our group of ex-mmrpg'ers.

I think I'm just prejudiced against .hack because it's an anime about a video game. Not as a straight adaptation, but as a meta-adaptation.

Back in the day, my friends and I used to play EQ night and day just so that we could power our way to the harder zones first.

Dark Age held my interest until I realized there was no high level content and I picked a gimpy class. I was the third or fourth highest friar on Merlin when I quit. In Dark Age, it isn't worth being anything except Midgard or archer. Mythic doesn't know jack squat about balancing a pvp game.

Everyone will play Star Wars when it comes out, but it was unimpressive at E3. I know I'm going against everyone who has seen the game so far, but it looked pretty boring for the ten minutes they were shooting storm troopers in the desert and touring Jaba's incomplete palace. *shrug*

EQ2 is creepy looking (in a bad way). All the models/worlds need to look way less plastic and manakin-like. Too early to tell.

World of Warcraft looked pretty fun though. I didn't see much of it but it seemed like Phantasy Star Online set in Warcraft world and with a whole ton of people. Very action oriented. At least Blizzard seems to understand my main complaint about MMRPGs -- they need to be fun to PLAY, not just a relationship between time and level. (EQ, DAOC, AC, etc.)

Incidentally, PSO as an MMRPG would be the best MMRPG ever (works better as a console game though). As a side note, DC > PS2. That was a damn fine machine, it's just too bad the PS2 lemming effect killed it. PSO (pre-massdupe) is still the best console online game. I kinda sucked, but it was more fun to play than grinding out levels in other PC games.

I don't have 6 hours a day to put into MMRPGs anymore, so I'm not sure I'd want to play anything. Regardless of what non-power-gamers insist, most MMRPG perks come from being the highest level of your class on your server. The one big sticking point: all the cool people level slow. All the assholes of the world level really quickly -- typically by using some no-brainer borderline exploit or by disregarding lower level players completely.

I could always watch an anime about an MMRPG instead, I suppose.

Gee, that was quite a bit of rambling. I should sleep.

jn

I have never played any rpgs like EQ ect due to my verrrry old system. But personaly there are a few older rpg's I wanna see as anime. Chrono Trigger, Lunar, Final Fantasy 1,4 and 6, Shining Force series, and the Phantasy Star series. Even though you would know the final outcome of such anime's if the writters were good they would stick to the story line and add just a few side quest stuff in here and there if they wanted it to be a tv show, or if they want a movie then just stick to soley the story. Ah well...I guess some dreams never do come true....

Not sure if you'd like MMRPGs anyway.

PC console games are essentially Bard's Tale and Ultima remade over and over. Even Morrowind, as "revolutionary" as it is, is still Ultima. They're all about numbers and minmaxing your character into the dirt. MMRPGs are Ultima with lots of people. (One of the first, in fact, was Ultima Online.)

Console RPGs are almost all story-based. The main advantages of console RPGs is that you can control the experience with a lot finer granularity than you can with a PC RPG. All the things console people hate (killing stuff to level up) are the bread and butter of PC RPGs. The minus is that the player has very little control over their experience. You can't choose to *not* save the world or save the princess or whatever.

My complaint about console RPGs in general is that they remind me of bad anime (and vice versa). The characters are all simplified dating sim cardboard cutouts. For instance, every RPG seems to have a winsome female Audrey Hepburn type. It's usually one of the "suggested romantic interests", with the other being some polar opposite. You can probably think of a half-dozen off the top of your head.

And for goodness sake, amnesia is *not* a valid plot device.

Of course, this isn't to say that PC RPGs are any better. Most of the stories in PC games are very, very thin, because of the typical non-linear nature. PC games unfortunately seem to be plagued by games that think scantily clad Xena Warrior Princess-types will somehow make more people buy a crappy game.

Pick your poison, I guess...